Winter D. Horton Jr., a broadcasting pioneer who co-founded KCET in Los Angeles, helped shape the nation's public television programming in the 1960s and later was appointed to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Board of Directors, died of natural causes Thursday in Pasadena. He was 80. Born June 2, 1929, in San Gabriel and educated at the Midland School in Los Olivos and Pomona College in Claremont, Horton got his first taste of show business at 19, as a gofer for his uncle, stage and screen actor Edward Everett Horton.

With the slowing economy affecting corporate underwriting, the Public Broadcasting Service trimmed its staff by more than 10%, or about 59 positions, its second round of cost-cutting in the past year. The cuts, to be made through a combination of 27 layoffs and the rest in unfilled positions, follow a 9% staffing reduction, or 60 positions, in March, and will bring PBS' total number of employees to just over 500.

PUBLIC television and radio broadcasters are preparing themselves for another difficult budget season after a key House Appropriations subcommittee voted Wednesday to cut $115 million from station operations, system upgrades and grants for children's programs such as "Reading Rainbow" and "Sesame Street."

After months of maneuvering, the short-run fate of public broadcasting should be clearer Thursday. The House Appropriations Committee will vote then on funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the outlook for the agency is better than at any other time this year. That is thanks to John Porter, an Illinois Republican, and Californian Frank Riggs, a Republican from Ukiah. In subcommittee action they bucked GOP threats to zero out the funding, joining with five Democrats.

Claiming that public television has a liberal bias, Senate Republican leaders have placed a "hold" on a bill to authorize funding for the Corp. for Public Broadcasting. The move, a delaying tactic that prevents a bill from being discussed, was put on the legislation at the behest of Republican senators, according to a senior aide to Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R--Kan.).

Top executives at the Public Broadcasting Service on Tuesday entered the fray over the "indecency oath" that Congress has imposed on recipients of funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, saying that PBS would "fully support" any producer who refused to sign such an oath. "I would be very surprised if our producers would sign that," Neil Mahrer, PBS executive vice president and chief operating officer, told a news conference at the Century Plaza hotel.

Epiphanies can come at you from the damnedest places. Mine was delivered by a cute, doe-eyed, bilingual animation character named Dora the Explorer. "Dora the Explorer" is the kind of morning children's show that epitomizes public television. It's gentle, funny, educational and culturally sensitive. Kids gobble it up. But "Dora" isn't produced or aired by PBS. If it were, it would cost tens of millions of dollars and become the subject of a thousand pledge breaks that might just help it to break even.

Jennifer Lawson, the new programming chief of the Public Broadcasting Service, said Friday that she aims "to rethink public television for a new generation of viewers" and provide programs that more accurately reflect the multicultural diversity of the country.

James L. Loper, a founder and former president of KCET Channel 28 who helped build the public broadcasting station into one of the nation's leading noncommercial outlets, has died. He was 81. Loper, who went on to oversee the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences , died Monday at his Pasadena home, his family said. No cause was announced. An Arizona transplant, Loper was a doctoral student at USC in the early 1960s when he joined a small group, the Committee for Educational Television, that was trying to establish a public broadcasting station in Los Angeles.